I have spent the last ten years or so working with people who are, by any measure anyone actually uses, doing very well. Partners in law firms. People running businesses. A few whose names you would probably know. And the thing almost none of them says out loud, at least not in the first few weeks, is that the standards which built the whole thing are now quietly taking it apart.
They do not say it because it sounds ungrateful. You cannot really sit in a very nice office and complain that being excellent at your job is ruining your life. So they do not. They tell me about the workload instead, or the travel, or a boss who is a nightmare, and then somewhere around week four somebody says "I just can't switch it off" in a slightly different voice, and we both know that is the actual conversation and everything before it was the warm-up.
Here is what I have come to think about perfectionism. It took me a long time and an MSc to get here, so bear with me.
Perfectionism is not really about wanting things to be perfect. That is the version on the fridge magnet, and it is why so many people cheerfully describe themselves as "a bit of a perfectionist" in interviews as though it were a personality quirk, like liking marmite. What it is actually about is what you believe happens if things are not perfect.
High standards and perfectionism are not the same thing
What you have to understand is this. High standards are a preference. You would like the thing to be good, you work hard to make it good, and when it is good you feel pleased, and when it is not quite there you feel a bit annoyed and you fix it. That is a completely functional way to live and the world runs on people like that.
Perfectionism is a condition of safety. It has to be good, or something bad happens. And the bad thing is almost never the thing you would name if I asked you. It is not the client. It is not the promotion. It is not the review or the ranking or the number.
It is the feeling.
Most of the people I sit with are not frightened of failing at the task. They are frightened of what failing at the task would say about them. And that is a completely different problem, because you cannot solve it by getting better at the task. You can get better at the task forever. Ask anyone who has been getting better at the task for twenty-five years and is still checking emails at eleven at night with a laptop balanced on their knees, telling themselves this is just a busy period.
It has been a busy period since 2003.
What it actually costs
I could tell you perfectionism causes anxiety, and it does, but that is abstract and everybody says it and nobody changes anything as a result. So instead, here are the things I genuinely see, most weeks, sitting in a room with someone.
You stop taking risks. Not dramatically. Nobody announces it. You just notice, over a few years, that you keep choosing the version of the project you already know you can do well. And you tell yourself it is a strategic decision. Sometimes it genuinely is. And sometimes it very much is not, and some part of you knows the difference.
You procrastinate. Which sounds completely mad for someone who works as hard as you do, and people always push back when I say it. But think about it properly. If a thing has to be excellent, and you cannot yet see how it is going to be excellent, then not starting is safer than starting badly. Perfectionists are some of the most impressive procrastinators I have ever met. They are just very busy while they do it.
You spend three hours on something that was finished after one. And here is the part that really gets people. You know it was finished after one. You are not confused. You just cannot leave it.
You cannot take a compliment, because you know exactly what you did not do, what you cut, what you would have done with another week. Somebody says the presentation was brilliant and you are already explaining the bit that was weak. You think you are being modest. You are actually being accurate, according to a standard nobody else can see.
And the reward never lands. You achieve the thing. You get roughly ninety seconds of feeling alright about it, sometimes less, and then your brain moves the line, and now the thing you just did is simply the baseline, and you are behind again.
That last one is the one that undoes people, and it is worth sitting with. It means you have organised an entire life around a payoff that is structurally incapable of arriving. Not unlikely to arrive. Incapable. The mechanism does not permit it. You could have everything you set out to have and the feeling would still be about four feet ahead of you, where it has always been.
Why nobody wants to give it up
Because it works. That is the honest answer, and I think we are quite patronising about this as a profession.
If you have been running on "not quite good enough" since you were about nine, and it has produced a career, a reputation, a life that from the outside looks enviable, then the fear underneath is not irrational at all. On some level you have concluded that the misery IS the engine. That the discomfort is what makes you good. And that if you took it away you would become lazy, or ordinary, or found out.
I understand that fear. I think anyone who breezily tells you to just be kinder to yourself has not really sat with how genuinely frightening that proposition is when your entire sense of who you are is built on the other thing.
However. I have been doing this a long time now, and I have never once seen it happen. Not once. Nobody has ever come back to me and said, well, I stopped hating myself and now I am rubbish at my job.
What actually happens is much less dramatic. People get slightly better at their work, because they stop wasting hours on things that were already finished, and they stop avoiding the projects that might expose them. And they get enormously better at their evenings.
So what do you do about it
I am not going to give you five steps, because there are not five steps, and if there were then somebody would have sold them to you by now, probably in a hardback with a very clean cover.
But I will say this. The work is almost never about lowering your standards. Nobody wants that, and frankly the world does not need less careful surgeons or more relaxed structural engineers. The work is about separating the standard from the safety. Getting to a place where the piece of work being merely good does not constitute evidence about your value as a human being.
That is slow. It usually involves going back and working out where you learned it, because you did learn it, from somewhere, and it was almost certainly a sensible adaptation at the time. Children are not stupid. If being excellent was the thing that got you attention, or kept the house calm, or made someone proud of you, then becoming excellent was a reasonable strategy. The problem is that you are forty-eight now and still running software written for a nine-year-old's circumstances.
Anyways. The reason I write about this as much as I do is that it is the single most common thing I see in people who are doing well, and it is almost never the thing they came to talk about. It is underneath the thing they came to talk about, and it has usually been there for decades, working away quietly, being mistaken for a work ethic.
If any of that landed a bit uncomfortably, that is probably worth paying some attention to.
What would you actually do differently, if the thing you made only had to be good?
Until next time, Stacy